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Florida man gives $13K to strangers at Waffle House, elsewhere with touching note

 

A Florida man’s story about a stranger’s act of kindness is warming hearts around the country and restoring faith in humankind.

 

In a series of posts on Twitter, Kevin Cate recounted his experience with a man he met at a Waffle House restaurant in Midway, Fla., last week.

 

Cate, a former Barack Obama campaign spokesman and the son of WFLA anchor Keith Cate, said he saw the man sitting alone in a booth, attaching money to some notes.

 

When asked what he was up to, the man told Cate he had been handing out $1 and $5 bills to people he meets at Waffle House, his favorite restaurant, and elsewhere. The man did not share his name.

 

Each notes says “Love Every Body” in bold text. The man told Cate those were the last three words his mother said to him before she passed away.

 

“She didn’t say ‘I love you.’ She said ‘Love everybody.’ So that’s what I’m doing,” the man said, according to Cate.

 

Cate said the man prints and cuts out the notes every few days, and has given away more than $13,000 to strangers since 2014.

 

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A Former CIA Disguise Expert Helps Disfigured People Regain Their Lives

 

Aubrey’s ear was sitting on a table, perfectly proportioned but just slightly the wrong color. It was the final step of what had been a painstaking process, and the ten-year-old girl—sitting patiently in an examination chair—waited as Robert Barron dabbed a whisker-thin brush onto a palette, swept the tiny bristles across the appendage, and blended the pigment to just the right hue. “I’ve mastered the technique,” he said, “of making silicone look like skin.”

 

Barron’s journey to this highly specialized career began, improbably, in the parking lot of the Pentagon. Back in the late 1960s, he was working as the art director for the Navy’s quarterly magazine, Directions, and the commute was making him nuts. He wasn’t important enough to qualify for a parking pass at the Pentagon, which meant he had to walk 15 minutes to and from a public lot. So Barron hatched a solution: He “borrowed” a parking pass from an unlocked car in the Pentagon lot and made a convincing replica for himself. The ruse worked for about a year, until one afternoon Barron went to retrieve his vehicle and found the police waiting for him. It wasn’t his fake pass that had given him away, but a colleague who was envious of his parking access.

 

About two weeks after that court appearance, Barron was called to a meeting with his superior officer. When he arrived, he was met by two men in dark suits who identified themselves as representatives of the CIA. Though they never said so, Barron assumes they had somehow seen his fake parking pass. They wanted to know if he might be interested in joining the Agency’s graphic-arts department.

 

Barron spent the next 25 years at the CIA. He started out in a unit that made fake documents and copied signatures, but eventually he started working on disguises for undercover agents. Among his trainers was John Chambers, the legendary Planet of the Apes makeup artist who did occasional work for the CIA (as seen in the film Argo). During Barron’s tenure, the spy agency was moving away from conventional wigs and fake beards toward more sophisticated silicone-based tradecraft. So Barron learned to shape the gelatinous material into facemasks that were realistic enough to fool the best counter-surveillance operatives in the world. He took extraordinary care to make sure he got every skin pore and nose hair just right. “Because if I issued a silicone mask to someone and their life was in jeopardy and they wouldn’t come home,” Barron says, “I’d have to live with that.”

 

In 1983, Barron attended an Association of Medical Sculptors seminar in New York as part of his ongoing CIA training. Once again, the course of his career veered unexpectedly. He discovered at the gathering that some badly disfigured people had had their lives transformed by the same material he was using to conceal the identities of American spies. Suddenly, Barron saw an opportunity to put his unusual talents to a different use. “If you can put people in hiding,” he says, “you can bring people out of hiding.”

 

Barron tells the story of a man named Tim, whose nose was disfigured in a boating accident. The ordeal pushed Tim into a deep depression; he removed all the mirrors in his house and told his girlfriend she should leave him. At one point, he slinked into his bathroom and pressed a revolver to his head. But after Barron attached a custom-made nose—just a small lump of rubber-like material—Tim’s life-­threatening depression evaporated and everything changed. Outcomes like that give Barron such satisfaction that, even at age 80, he still sees many clients each year. “How the heck can I retire?” he says.

 

As it turned out, Aubrey was another happy customer. With her new ear attached, she got up from the chair and walked to a mirror. There she was, the same ten-year-old kid as before—only now with a pair of perfectly ordinary ears, complete with the tiny pearl earrings she had wanted. Now, when she went back to her elementary school in Ohio, she’d be able to wear glasses or put her hair in a ponytail. “Oh, my gosh,” she said, throwing her hands over her mouth. Then she whirled around and hugged Barron.

 

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